Editorial: Sociomateriality in Children With Typical and/or Atypical Development.

The idea of sociomateriality mainly originates from the vast area of perspectives on psychological development related to empiricism. In simple terms, it could be said that sociomateriality stresses the contribution of individual and collective experience by putting more emphasis on the role that corporeity, physical contexts, and objects play in the development or emergence of psychological functions. Unfortunately, like any simplification, this one has objective limits. What makes it difficult to establish a unified framework to define sociomateriality, and above all to determine its relationship to psychological development, is, first of all, an epistemological question that is still the subject of a wide debate in several scientific areas, including philosophy (Searle, 2007) archaeology and material cultures (Malafouris, 2013), ergonomics (Geslin, 2017), anthropology and sociology (Latour, 2005), cognitive sciences (Clark, 2008), psychotherapy (Searles, 1960), developmental psychology (Iannaccone et al. 2018; Moro and Rodríguez, 1998; Moro, 2016) and learning itself (Engeström, 2015; Iannaccone, 2017; Cattaruzza et al., 2019). Within the limited extent of this introduction to the variegated Topic hosted by Frontiers in Psychology, we can identify the heart of the epistemological problem in two fundamental questions: (a) what are the boundaries of the mind with respect to corporeity and the context in which it operates? and (b) what could be the real contribution that artefacts give to the development of psychological functions, particularly learning?